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The D’Artagnan Anniversary Party

By Daniel Meyer February 26, 2010 7:30 pmFebruary 26, 2010 7:30 pm

(Daniel attends the big deal culinary event of the season, or at least the month – MB)

It’s 6:30 p.m. in the dining room of Daniel, Daniel Boulud’s flagship restaurant on the Upper East Side. Forty-five minutes ago we were ushered in by a band of musketeers waving rapiers and blowing horns. In five minutes the musketeers are due to escort us to two buses waiting on the street which will drive us to Jean-Georges, owned by Jean-Georges Vongerichten.

Mr. Boulud tells us that Jean-Georges has texted him ten times to find out when we are coming. He says he wants to keep us here a little longer, so Jean-Georges will have to wait to fire the next course. In the seat next to mine, Anthony Bourdain is chuckling.

To mark the 25th anniversary of her company, D’Artagnan, Ariane Daguin, a native of the Gascon region in the southwest of France, flew in over two hundred of her countrymen for a week-long celebration in New York. There was live Gascon music and an exhibition of Gascon art, a tasting of Gascon wines and even a rugby match in Central Park (Gascons vs. New Yorkers) that left one of Ms. Daguin’s foie gras producers with a broken leg.

What’s more, throughout the week Ms. Daugin installed a handful of Michelin-starred Gascon chefs in some of the most venerated kitchens in the city. The collaborations between the visiting chefs and their hosts culminated last Sunday in what D’Artagnan billed as, “The 32 Star Dinner: A Progressive Dining Experience.” Thirty-two is the total number of Michelin and New York Times stars achieved by the group of chefs responsible for the meal, which, true to the epicurean spirit of the evening, was served not in one restaurant, but in four: cocktails, hors d’oeuvres, and the first two courses at Daniel, the next at Jean-Georges, two more at Per Se, and dessert at Le Bernardin. The buses that chauffeured us from stop to stop were filled with Gascon Armagnac.

I knew we were in for a good night when I asked a couple standing in the bar at Daniel how they were enjoying their hors d’oeuvres of foie gras crème brulee with prunes. They could tell me, they said, but would rather watch my face as I took the first bite of my own; the seduced smile and slight week-kneed quiver that crept up to my face as I tasted the dish must have said it all.

As for the dinner, Daniel Boulud and Jean Marie Gautier began with a triangle (a big triangle) of duck foie gras poached in red wine. After that Daniel Humm of Eleven Madison Park, and Jacques Pourcel delivered a luscious scallop in its shell with tapioca pearls, pureed watercress and black truffles. At this point I could have left a very happy man, but instead I climbed on to a bus with Emeril, took a swig from a nip of Armagnac, and headed for Jean-Georges.

Jean-Georges and his collaborator for the evening, Michel Bras, made a dish of squab and wide, thin noodles of celery root seasoned with allspice, orange, and a whole lot more. Mr. Bras, as Mr. Bourdain explained to me, was the Chuck Berry and The Beatles of French chefs; the most imitated, the most venerated. He was an eleventh-hour substitute for the event, so his course did not take shape until the day before, when he and Mr. Vongerichten found some celery root in the greenmarket that they both liked. Speaking to the diners in Jean-Georges with Ms. Daguin as his translator, Mr. Bras said that the world is becoming so virtual and ephemeral that what he wanted most was to give this dish a real identity, one that bears the marks both of the chefs who cooked the ingredients and of the farmers who created them.

At Per Se we ate capon with truffles stuffed under the skin and a little nugget of lobster, Boudin de cuisse (made with the thigh meat of the capon) with Brussels sprouts, and butternut squash and chestnut confites, and (strangely, one of the highlights of the night), the best Parker House rolls I have ever had. Slipping back through the kitchen on the way to our final stop, I was introduced to Helene Darroze, Mr. Keller’s collaborator for the evening.

Dessert at Le Bernardin, a dish of confited apples and another called “Chocolat, Chocolat, Chocolat” was punctuated by three more glasses of wine, one last round of Armagnac, and the return of the Gascon band. It was an appropriately indulgent end to a pretty remarkable meal. I think it is fairly safe to say that I will never have a dinner like this again.

This was not my first time attending a decadent D’Artagnan event. Last spring I competed in the 5th annual Duckathlon, a series of culinary events organized by D’Artagnan in the meatpacking district. On more than one occasion during the competition our amateurish grasp of traditional French cuisine was exposed, and the Gascon delegation took notice. We floundered; they heckled. It was all in great fun, but still the experience elicited in me a sour-grapes disdain for the rigorous food culture of the French. I swore to myself that a high food expertise could never compare to the comfort and ease of cooking and eating with family.

I was wrong.

The pursuit and achievement of that kind of expertise does not deny a sense of familial comfort, it creates it. The camaraderie, gratitude, and absolute respect amongs Ms. Daugin and all the chefs was truly a pleasure to take in, even more than Daniel Boulud’s foie gras, or Thomas Keller’s Boudin. Mr. Bourdain guessed that every one of the chefs would rather be eating a simple bowl of something at home than a plate of whatever they were cooking, but that this night was all about mutual idolization and respect; the real joy came from working with and paying tribute to one another.